Verne Gay

Ken Tucker

Over the first five episodes made available for review, the show--created by Peter Mattei with producers including Peter Tolan (Rescue Me) and Paul Giamatti--amounts to a hill of beans. Beans with a lot of gassy verbiage.

Robert Lloyd

Dan Fienberg

If the half-baked subcultural anthropology doesn't grab you, Outsiders starts slow, but begins detonating little pockets of insanity in nearly every episode, proving that audacity without dramatic foundation can be amusing, if not necessarily good.

Rob Owen

Jousting on ATVs aside, there’s not a lot of exciting, forward plot momentum in the first few episodes, but later episodes spend more time with characters in town, and episode four includes a plot twist that will either make viewers sit up and take notice or prompt them to turn off the TV.

Ray Rahman

Outsiders is a decent addition to the [bearded strongmen struggling for power] field, with just enough peculiar intrigue, world-building, and acting heft to make its existence--sorry--justified. [29 Jan/5 Feb 2016, p.103]

Mark A. Perigard

Brian Lowry

Outsiders is slow going in its opening chapters, and the best hope for the 13-episode run is that the series does generally improve as it progresses, by the fourth and fifth episodes finding moments of dark humor, while hostilities between the corporate interests and the family gradually escalate. Although Morse is compelling as always--boozing, scheming and defiant by turns--the real standout is Wright as the stammering, weary sheriff.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Some of the scenes verge on action-movie absurdity (most of the stuff involving all-terrain vehicles feels like a real-world hiccup of the Mad Max series), but there are low-key, even tender moments, too, sometimes with a touch of odd humor.

Dennis Perkins

The world of the show feels lived in, especially once it discovers its sense of humor, evidenced by an escalatingly destructive drinking-and-bonding session between Foster and Asa. For all its essential artificiality, Outsiders’ cast resolutely keeps things natural.

Allison Keene

Though Outsiders seems to have high ambitions and a complex story to tell, it’s not pretentious. There are great elements to it that are reminiscent to the FX series Sons of Anarchy and Justified, although it also occupies its own unique space.

Amber Dowling

Sweeping and complex with a large cast of characters to delve into, The Outsiders isn’t necessarily new or gripping television, but it’s structured drama that delivers results thanks to the likes of Peter Tolan and Paul Giamatti at the helm as executive producers.

Ed Bark

This is a firmly grounded and compelling drama that’s both ripe for lampooning on Saturday Night Life and rich in story possibilities. Its us-against-them template holds solid over the first five episodes.

Vicki Hyman

These extended sojourns on the mountain, though beautifully shot, are self-serious to the point of spoof. That said, the performances--a supremely shaggy David Morse as Big Foster, a mercurial leader of the clan, Joe Anderson as Asa, who returned to the fold after a decade in the outside world, and Thomas M. Wright as troubled deputy Wade Houghton Jr., with a mysterious link to the Farrells--are strong throughout. And there's much in the material that resonates.